locked and loaded

Dick Clinch is not one who is afraid to say that he might have been wrong, so I’m going to say it. I may have been wrong.

In my zeal to bring to light that the Vice-President of the United States may have had too much to drink and while he was drinking, pumped a friend full of bird shot, I may have given the great sport of poker a bad name. Many of you read my hypothetical account of the incident and my suggestion that it could have happened during a poker game that went horribly wrong. Now, word is spreading around the globe like wildfire that the game of poker has gotten another good man shot and hospitalized.

“Yet more poker-related violence,” is the mantra we are beginning to hear.

Please, my good friends, let’s nip this in the bud. Please disregard the setting of my previous accounting of this story as being situated around Mr. Hoyle’s glorious game. Instead, let’s take this thing back out to the back forty.

The point I wanted to emphasize was that the Vice-President may have had something in addition to the beer at lunch and that the event was not immediately reported so any alcohol would have had time to pass through the Veep’s system. By not reporting the incident to the press, any drinking the Veep may have done was long forgotten. Anyway, here is the way it may have gone down.

Mr. Cheney unscrewed the cap from the bottle in his hip pocket and took a long, refreshing taste. He looked up at the late-afternoon Texas sky and felt the warm breeze wash over his face, renewing his spirit, much like the bourbon in the bottle had renewed his tongue. He put the bottle to his lips again and swallowed hard.

“Maybe you should take it easy on the booze,” suggested one of his hunting comrades.

“I’m the motherfucking Vice-President of the motherfucking United States, motherfucker,” intoned Mr. Cheney, “And I know when I’ve had enough to drink, and motherfucker, I haven’t had nearly enough.”

He fired a random blast into the air and shouted, “Yee Hah! Now, point me in the direction of those motherfucking birds.”

Cheney closes up his bottle, puts it in his hip pocket and at that exact moment the dogs scare up a covey. The Veep gets off a quick shot and it’s a lucky shot, too, because one of those little bitty quail sort of disintegrates in mid air and the dog hunts down its mangled corpse and brings it back to the Vice-President. The Veep gets down on one knee and looks at the decimated bird on the ground. As his comrades gather round, he looks up like Michael Parks in Kill Bill and says, “Little cocksucker’s still breathin’.”

“Really?” Asked one of his party.

“No, not really. You dumb fuck, I blew this little cocksucker to bits.”

The group continued on their hunt until the dogs scared up another covey. This time the lawyer got off a clean shot and sent one of the quail to its reward. While he and his dog were fetching the feckless fowl, the feculent Veep went again to the well in his hip pocket and drank long and deep from its soothing liquid.

A young secret service agent close by spoke up at that time.

“Mr. Vice-President,” he suggested, “Perhaps you should finish that bottle after the hunt.”

“Oh I should, should I? Perhaps when you’re in my position, you can make that call. But let me remind you, young man, I’m the motherfucking Vice-President of the motherfucking United States of America and I know when I’ve fucking had enough, motherfucker.”

He shouted the last line and it scared a covey of quail, and the Veep immediately reacted to the sound of a dozen flapping wings, turning and firing almost instinctively. Even through the haze of bourbon he saw his friend fall and he knew he had screwed up bad this time. While the secret service and Cheney’s medical team ran to the spot where the lawyer had fallen, the Vice-President fell to his knees, removed the bottle from his hip pocket and threw it across the field. He raised his teary eyes to the heavens and asked for help. God looked down upon him.

“Go fuck yourself,” said God.

The young secret service agent recovered the bottle and brought it back to the agent in charge.

“What do I do with this? “He asked.

“I don’t give a fuck,” said the agent in charge. “As long as it is never seen by a human being again.”

“What do we do after I get rid of the bottle?”

“We get medical care for the mouthpiece. We put on the biggest fucking pot of coffee you ever saw in your life. We get the Veep out of Day-Glo orange and into butt naked, get him in the shower and then fill him full of coffee. That is, after we get him dried off and some clothes on his bare-naked ass. Then, we act like nothing happened for eighteen hours, or until he can pass a Breathalyzer.”

“Yeah, but if we wait eighteen hours to tell everyone what happened the press’ll have a field day.”

“If we don’t wait eighteen hours, and someone sees this slobbering drunk, ain’t no amount of spinning that’ll save his ass.”


So, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. That story will have to do until I can make up a better one. In the meantime, lets have a drink to our health.

Or my name isn’t Dick Clinch.